The Courtesan (17 page)

Palais Kinsky

THE TWELFTH YEAR OF
THE GUANGXU REIGN

1887

Vienna,
Austria

A SINGLE STEP

Jinhua

The train is slowing down. “It is a cart that runs by fire,” Wenqing said when they boarded at the Genova Piazza Principe railway station. Clambering up the steps from the platform into the carriage he became dizzy and almost fell, and it is the long, rough journey and his sorrow at leaving China—and it is the death, too, of Madam Hong—that have made him so frail, although he says nothing about any of this. When it was her turn to board, a foreign devil man in a pine-green suit gripped Jinhua by her armpits and hoisted her onto the train as though she were a sack of rice. Now, many hours later, the train is gasping, and there is a squealing, grinding sound and then a tremendous, unexpected jolt that shakes the air. The ground is suddenly still. Veins of frost gild the windows like cracks in the glass, and outside on the platform the dark and bulky shapes of barbarian people are passing.

Vienna—the stop is Vienna's South Railway Station. It is the
end of the journey, and they will stay here, and Jinhua and Wenqing are on the opposite side of the world where nothing is the way it is in China, and almost everything is the reverse of what they know. This is what Wenqing said to Jinhua as they traveled across the sea. That here the soles of men's boots are black instead of white, that vests are worn inside a man's jacket instead of outside; that women bind their waists instead of their feet, and people read from left to right. And yes, it is a fact that when the golden bird of the sun is rising here, it is the jade hare of the moon that lights the Suzhou sky.

Wenqing told her also that much of what is true in China is no longer true now that they are here, in Europe, and Jinhua does not believe this because Madam Hong is dead and buried in a coffin of the finest
nanmu,
and even here, in a place so far from Suzhou—even here this is true. The picture of Madam Hong's dusky, staring eyes, her neck so long, her chin sharply tilted, has traveled across the sea in Jinhua's mind.
Do not forget Chastity
—Jinhua thinks of this, and she thinks about Suyin, who loves her still, she is sure, although she herself thinks less often about Suyin than before. There is so much that is new to occupy her thoughts, so much to be learned.

Jinhua has now seen for herself the dark-soled boots that Wenqing spoke of—these and the women with large shoes and pinched waists in tight clothing. That night and day are opposite is impossible to believe, and the names of these places are, she finds, unpronounceable.
Genova,
where they boarded the train.
Europe,
which is a small place among the great continents.
Vienna,
the city of the barbarian emperor whose name is Franz Joseph.

Jinhua feels small and cold among the strange sights and sounds and smells. Wenqing is sleeping, as he has for most of the journey, with bits of paper in his ears to stop the noise, and the jolt of their
arrival has not woken him. His eyes are closed, and his eyeballs pulse like a nervous heartbeat beneath the folds of his eyelids. He has been oblivious to the great, foreign-glass windows of the train, the images streaming past at speeds that made him ill, he said. When the train entered into one side of a mountain and came out on the other side after many moments of darkness, even then he slept. And when he woke, he would touch Jinhua's arm, her shoulder, her leg, as though to reassure himself, and she would squeeze his hand.

Her questions have exhausted him, she knows.
What is this? What does that mean? When will we get there? Why do the foreign devils do this or that or the other?

“I don't know,” he said, again and again, closing his eyes, leaning back against the seat. She is insatiable with these questions. And yet she has had to let him rest, to recover from the shock he has had.

The journey has been long. From Suzhou it was the river barge that took them to Shanghai, where Jinhua saw for the first time the strangely shaped and strangely colored foreign barbarian people.

From Shanghai it was a great steamship with an unpronounceable name—the SS
Agamemnon
—that bore them across the vast and churning sea under tile-blue skies and pummeling, exuberant winds. It was cold on deck. The planks beneath their feet heaved in many directions. This wildness did not suit Wenqing. Leaving, his eyes were fixed on dwindling China. He avoided other, closer sights. His fingers clutched the handrail. The wind forced strands of his hair to abandon his always perfect queue as though it had no regard for his dignity, no proper sense of his shame. Without looking down, he pulled a fistful of paper money from his sleeve and flung it into the ocean. “To appease the dragons of the sea,” he said.

For Jinhua, it was not like this. She did not fear the sea. She was astonished by every moment. When the steamship left
Shanghai she did as the other passengers did; she waved—to people who were not there, to Suyin, to the boatman with his pussy willow, to Baba and Timu, to Lao Mama, and to no one in particular. She waved vigorously, joyfully; she moved in ways she had never moved before. She stood among the foreign devils. She stared at them. She had never felt a wind like this, so powerful, so impulsive, so unrestrained, pushing and pulling at her body. It was like riding on the back of a dragon, its muscles flexing, scales glittering, spine heaving and thrusting. There was no controlling this dragon of the sea.

She wanted Wenqing to share in this, but he could not, and she herself was astonished by her joy and her excitement. She was astonished, too, at how easy it was to forget what she did not care to remember.

The ship had not gone far when all he had eaten came out of Wenqing's stomach, and he took to their cabin on the second-class deck, where the Chinese passengers traveled separate from their servants—and separate, too, from the foreign devils. They stopped in Hong Kong, Manila, and Singapore. In Colombo and Port Said. They had glimpses from the cabin porthole of sails and ropes and men with naked feet and naked thighs and rippling muscles, hoisting jute bags full with cargo, and Jinhua could not stop looking, and Wenqing's eyes were barely open.

When they reached Colombo, Wenqing said, “We must not leave the ship. It is dirty and dangerous in this place. It is uncivilized.” Jinhua stayed with him, and he vomited again and again, and when he felt well enough he showed her the path that they were traveling on a map. Seeing Suzhou marked there as a small, dark dot on a large map, she thought fleetingly of Suyin, and then when Wenqing began to tell her more about the foreign devils, those thoughts floated away. “They are not moral people,” Wenqing said, and he sounded bewildered and not a little angry. “They do
not revere their parents, or concern themselves with rightful conduct. They do not cultivate virtue and respect as we do, and they value only material possessions. Worst of all,” he said, “they are altering the shapes of our ancient maps. They taunt us into war time and time again; they carve our lands into pieces to be chewed and swallowed like meat. And the maps are changed, just like that—and these are things that I have read and I know to be true. These things are not hearsay.”

It is Wenqing's way of seeing what is wrong, to speak of the maps. To speak of Sun Tzu and knowing one's enemy. But when they reached Genova and were surrounded in all six directions—north and south and east and west and up and down—by these people with pink faces, Jinhua was more and more enthralled and Wenqing's worries seemed tedious and uninteresting.

And now, at last, they are in Weiyena, where they will live—for a while—for two years or maybe three. A man is blowing a whistle and screaming—words that cannot be understood. Wenqing is awake; his eyes are open, plump from too much sleep, with circles as large as coins under his eyes. She pats his arm.
Yijing daole,
she tells him. We have already arrived. He nods. His cheeks are shallow from eating only foods he does not know or like. He is trying his best to look substantial in his silk coat and his fur-trimmed winter hat that have made the journey from Genova like ornaments, perched on an empty seat across from him on the train—and Jinhua is thinking that her husband appears as insubstantial here in Weiyena as a single grain of rice would look on the bottom of an empty barrel.

Interpreter Ma is here to meet them on the platform, nodding and bowing deeply in the Chinese way, his gloved hands clasped, saying,
“
Huanying. Huanying.”
Welcome, Excellency. Welcome, Madam. He says this a dozen times or more, and Wenqing looks overjoyed to see a Chinese face, and it is as though he might topple to the ground from so much bowing and thanking in Interpreter Ma's direction.

Jinhua is clutching Wenqing's arm, and she does this for his sake as well as for her own. She is dressed in the new padded coat that he bought for her in Shanghai, and she is worried, just a little, that her hair is in disarray after the long, long journey. The foreign people on the platform, she notices, are looking at Wenqing. They are looking at her. Looking and staring and saying things in the strange language that they speak.

“The coachman will take you to the Palais Kinsky, where you will reside while you are in Weiyena. His name is Suo Bo Da
.
” The interpreter speaks quickly, but he pronounces the foreign devil name slowly and as though it were a three-character Chinese name. Then he repeats it a second time as though he had swallowed it into a single syllable.

Swoboda.

Jinhua feels exhilarated and faint, surrounded on the platform of the station by movement and trunks and pink faces and fur. On her bound feet she cannot walk as fast as everyone else is walking, and her feet are small and theirs are not—and the winter air moves through her, parting the slit at the side of her coat, snatching the breath from her mouth, freezing her cheeks. Interpreter Ma says he will follow later in another carriage with the servants and the luggage. “Herr Swoboda is waiting over there,” he says, leading them, and the barbarian people are still staring.

The carriage has wheels the size of moon gates in a Chinese wall. The horses are massive and have dangerous, bloodshot eyes and impatient hooves that with a single step could crush a Chinese
person's foot. Herr Swoboda has teeth the size of Jinhua's thumbs, and a black hat that is tall and round and shaped like a drum, and his hair is astonishing, the color of an overripe persimmon. Interpreter Ma is speaking with him now, and this barbarian language is full of guttural howling, barking, hissing noises. Wenqing whispers into Jinhua's ear, “The interpreter speaks the language of the barbarians with great skill. He has been here for just one year. Before that he was a student at the Dong Wen Guan in Peking, where he studied their language,” and Jinhua is amazed by this speaking of a language that is totally new, and by all that she sees in every direction.

Wenqing keeps his eye on the huge, foreign coachman named Suo Bo Da, and standing near him Jinhua feels like a child; her chin is no higher than the coachman's elbow, and Wenqing looks as small as a boy, and everything is large here, larger than in China; larger, louder, stranger even than in Shanghai, where they saw many barbarian foreign devils. The sounds of passing carriages, of clapping hooves on cobblestones, are hollow sounds, quite unlike anything one hears in Suzhou, where the roads are made of dirt. And Jinhua murmurs the coachman's foreign name to herself just to hear herself say the sounds—“Swoboda.” Wenqing turns to her and says, “What did you say?” and there is so much to take in, to see, to hear. So she doesn't answer him.